In my early years, I suffered the same pheromone-driven need to chest-butt my buddies. Part of this was to tell each other salacious jokes. One of those was about a logging camp isolated deep in the Canadian forest. Their cook gets invalided out, which forces the lumberjacks to take turns staying in camp to cook for themselves. None of them are any good at the job, but a convention is soon agreed that, whoever complain gets the job. One guy is stuck for weeks, despite cooking worse and worse meals. But nobody complains. In desperation, he goes into the woods, collects a pile of moose turds and bakes them into pies. The lumberjacks return, dig into their steaming pies and the first one to take a bite stops in mid-chew. “Damn me!” he exclaims “but this tastes just like moose turd pie!” Then a pause. “It’s good though!”

This decades-old chestnut came back to me while watching PMQ repeats on BBC Parliament. Each week, Corbyn re-hashes the same high socialist outrage. Why does he do this? Why would anyone with intelligence and decades of experience blunder into the same political cul-de-sac week after week?

And then it struck me: despite palpable government weakness, if Corbyn brought down Theresa May, he would find himself hobbling in her kitten heels. He would be assaulted by a plummeting pound, a hostile Europe, a deranged America, a Chinese juggernaut, all wrapped around a rock-hard deal-less Brexit knuckleduster, leaving exports floundering and the economy sputtering. In short, he would have made himself the cook. So, his weekly lumberjack with a mouthful of moose turd pie performance, may show a subtlety that none have heretofore expected. Despite appearances of outrge, he is not, in fact, complaining; he is praising, .